Stroke center lands $15.8M deal with Toshiba

An “unbelievable” $15.8 million commitment for new equipment and support from Toshiba Corp. will allow the University at Buffalo to expand its Toshiba Stroke Research Center this spring.

The commitment from Toshiba. includes $7 million in new imaging equipment, plus service and research support for 10 years valued at $8.8 million.

“This package is almost unbelievable, in terms of all the cool stuff that’s happening here,” says Dr. L. Nelson Hopkins, co-director of the center and chairman of the neurosurgery department in UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “When people come from other places to see it, it knocks them off their feet.”

Doug Ryan, vice president of marketing and strategic development at Toshiba America Medical Systems in California, says Hopkins and his team at the Toshiba Stroke Research Center have made tremendous strides, and the company is eager to continue supporting those efforts.

“I think we’ve changed the paradigm of stroke treatment here in the United States, at least,” he says. “It really is a tremendously exciting opportunity the team has created there,” he says. “I really think it’s going to be a world-class center in the United States.”

The Toshiba Stroke Research Center will move from its current home at Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital to the top floor of the new Clinical and Translational Research Center, which is set to open in May on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in a shared building with Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute.

Much of the imaging equipment installed in recent weeks on the lower floors of the building in Kaleida’s GVI are also Toshiba machines. Ryan says the concept of the building is recognized as revolutionary and is probably a model of how health care will be delivered in the future.

“It’s something that we believe is really the model of the future and that’s the main reason we’re so interested in supporting it,” he says.

Hopkins says having the Toshiba center in the same building as the GVI and the CTRC is key, as researchers can advance their work and test it without ever having to leave the building.

“We’re developing new ideas and innovations and learning how to use them on patients, and training physicians and scientists on how it gets used,” he says. “Then if we need to test it further, we can take it right upstairs to the Toshiba Stroke Research Center.”

The new equipment from Toshiba will be installed this summer, including two biplane angiography machines; a 3T MRI (3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging) unit; a 320-slice computed tomography (CT) scanner; and advanced ultrasound equipment.

Co-founded by Hopkins in 1997 with a $3.6 million gift from Toshiba, the research center was designed as a place where researchers from different disciplines could collaborate on stroke research. Toshiba has contributed a total of $25.8 million over the past 13 years. Hopkins is considered a superstar in the neurosurgery world and has developed a reputation based on his innovations in minimally invasive surgical techniques to treat aneurysms and stroke.

The Toshiba Stroke Research Center focuses on research related to the prevention and treatment of vascular disease through minimally invasive techniques.

Hopkins and his team have formed a series of strategic alliances with local, national and international partners to advance their research. Advances to date in imaging optimization have also led to potential new advances in device design, which in turn have presented new opportunities for hemodynamic investigation.

Recent successes touted on the center’s website include the development of a micro-angiographic fluoroscopy system that shows detail at the site of neurological intervention two to three times more clearly than imaging equipment now in use. The team is now working to make the system operator-friendly.

In addition to Toshiba, research at the center has been supported by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health. That includes the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; and the National Science Foundation.